Recently, I accompanied a delegation of CSU scientists, led by professor Diana Wall, director of our School of Global Environmental Sustainability, to hold a workshop with our counter-parts at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment in Richmond, Australia, on the topic of the ecological effects of increased carbon dioxide and concomitant climate change on the ecosystem.

I do not work in this field myself, and so I was shocked to learn how bad things are already getting. While in this country these issues have been politicized, the Australians, in contrast, are taking matters deadly seriously.

Studies at HIE have directly shown that increasing the availability of CO2 to trees and plant life cause adaptations. Leaves tend to get bigger, but this allows increased water evaporation, and unless the species can resist this event it dies [thus explaining increasing deforestation events]. The ability of leaves to store carbohydrates also drops, losing a nutrient source for the animals, birds and insects that feed on them. Below the ground the myriad of soil invertebrate and bacterial species, which have broad activities ranging from providing nitrogen to plants to decomposing litter, are contracting dramatically.

Climatologists are predicting increasing drought conditions in Australia, interspersed with extreme weather events. In fact, drought is a global problem, from California farms to the farms and grasslands of the central USA, to the wheat fields of Tasmania. In the latter, a sustained drop in crops has had a major impact on feed availability for the island's dairy cow industry, resulting in sharp increases in milk prices. CSU is now helping lead an international consortium to monitor these drought events globally.

In the Pacific, small islands have submerged as sea levels have risen. Larger islands have experienced crop failures as soil salinity has substantially increased. Fishing has also been impacted as fish go deeper to cooler water. This has driven migrations of islanders to adjacent main-lands, resulting in a "boat people" problem currently causing serious political tensions between Papua New Guinea and Australia.

Just as mosquitos carrying the dengue virus are heading north through Mexico due to increased air temperatures, these also now have a foothold in northern Australia. At the same time there has been a mass die-off of bats [which are very sensitive to temperature changes] that usually eat these mosquitos. Of great concern is that in this area, close to the major tourist centers around the Great Barrier Reef, the conditions are now favorable for the influx of mosquitos from Papua New Guinea that transmit the malaria parasite.

A rise of a couple of inches in sea levels, and a couple of degrees in ambient temperatures does not seem much, and it isn't, but the domino effects are clearly already being seriously felt. There are some who do not think this is man-made, but just the extreme edge of many-thousand year weather cycles. A few misinformed people even push the pathetic notion that several thousand scientists locked themselves in a room and made the whole thing up. At the end of the day, however, it matters not if these events are man-made or natural, because they are REAL. The Australians are already facing up to this and working on potential ways to mitigate, and we need to do so, too, before this turns into a global catastrophe.

Ian Orme is university distinguished professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, and director of International Programs for Australia and New Zealand, at Colorado State University.